NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR AGRARIAN REFORM

32 Pages·2007·2.4 MB·English

Mexico & Caribbean Area Series
Vol. V No. 5
(CUBA)
U
nive eld Staff
NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR AGRARIAN REFORM
Instrument of Revolution in Cuba
by Irving P. Pflaum
Havana
August 1960
The major force of the Revolution going on
in Cuba is to be found in the agrarian reform pro-
gram. The legal basis for agrarian reform is a
law "enacted" on May 17, 1959,l and officially pub-
lished on June 3 of the same year. The program,
itself, is administered by the National Institute for
Agrarian Reform (INRA). Dr. Fidel Castro, Prime
Minister and Maximum Leader, is President of the
Institute, and Dr. Antonio ~ 6 ~ i~eizm e'nez,p rofessor
of geography on leave from the Central University
of Las Villas and Rebel Army captain, is INRA
Executive Director.
But the connection between the Agrarian
Reform Law and the acts carried out in its name
is fuzzy. And the relations between the National
Institute for Agrarian Reform in Havana and INRA
representatives outside Havana are obscure. This
became clear to me during studies in the Province
of Pinar del Rio and clearer still after I had taken
a look at INRA in the other five provinces.
The differences between agrarian reform as
a law and agrarian reform in practice range from
administrative to substantive and they are varied
-
and countless, but they have in common one char
acteristic : the conscious reshaping of moderate,
humanist reforms into class war far e
-
directed toward the creation of author
itarian statism in Cuba.
In an earlier report, I dis-
cussed the fate of Hubert Matos, a
close associate of Fidel Castro in the
insurrection against Fulgencio Batista.
Castro had Matos sent to prison for
30 years for trying in the Province of
Camaguey to halt the transformation
of the agrarian reform into an instru-
ment of class warfare. The adminis-
trators of the reform in camaguey
now admit that with the departure of
Matos they began their work of taking
privately owned land and cattle into
the state co-operatives of INRA, and
gradually extending INRA ' s empire to
entire plantations and ranches and to
industry and merchandising.
Captain Jorge E. Mendoza
Captain Mendoza Roboredo
Roboredo, who is said to have de-
nounced Matos, heads INRA in the province. Even members of his staff con-
sider him a Marxist dedicated to the classless proletarian society, and many
Cubans I met in Camaguey freely call him a Communist.
One of the INRA zone administrators who had his headquarters in the
town of Florida fled from his post and reportedly entered an embassy in Havana
1
Dr. Fidel Castro and the Revolutionary Government of Cuba can be said
to have "enacted" legislation. The Revolutionary Council of Ministers agreed
to the Agrarian Reform Law on May 17, 1959, and declared it to be part of the
Fundamental Law of the Republic. The 1940 Cuban Constitution was abolished
as the result of the victorious Revolution. The Fundamental Law was enacted
on February 7, 1959, by' the Council of Ministers and the President of the Re-
public. The Council of Ministers is the sovereign representative body of the
Revolutionary Government of Cuba. It has powers to make a constitution and
to amend it. It made the Fundamental Law and it can amend it by two-thirds
vote repeated at three successive sessions. The Agrarian Reform Law is
part of the Fundamental Law. The Supreme Court of Cuba has repeatedly held
that revolutions are the source of Law. There is no legislature in Cuba now
and no law supreme to that of the Council of Ministers can be enacted. The
Council of Minister s , being supr eme, can change anything, including the Funda-
mental Law and the procedure for amending it. The Judiciary is a separate
organ of the government under the Fundamental Law.
The official published version of the Agrarian Reform Law is reproduced
in Appendix I.
seeking political exile abroad, while I was visiting the province. So far as I
could ascertain he had been charged with "obstructingt' the agrarian reform
which could mean that he, like Matos last autumn, had resisted some extreme
measures ordered by his chiefs.
As proclaimed a year ago, Cuba's Agrarian Reform Law was dedicated
to distributing fertile land taken from the owners of large plantations, farms
and ranches to landless farmers. The law's "vital minimum'' or base (and
probably also the intended maximum) for a family of five persons was two
caballerl'as or about 67 acres of fertile soil without irrigation and away from
urban centers. The "vital minimum'' was to be a gift to the landless family.
Sharecroppers, lessees of farm land, cane growers, subcolonos (a
lessee of a lessee who is legally protected against dispossession by the owner,
usually a sugar refinery), and squatters occupying and using land of under
five caballer<as (about 167 acres) also were assured free the "vital minimum"
of two -cabs. (A cabal1er:a equals 33.3 acres and is commonly called a "-cab." )
The landowner could be required to sell to a family on the land enough to as-
sure it of five cabs. The owners of less than two cabs were to receive free
enough land to bring their holdings up to the "vital minimum."
The farm land destined to go into many thousands of "vital minimumst'
to be donated to the landless and to poor farmers was to come from land ex-
propriated by INRA from landowners with more than 30 cabs (999 acres) or
100 cabs (3,330 acres) depending on circumstances stated in the Agrarian
Reform Law. These were: when the land meets the minimum yield require-
ments of the law for land planted in cane or rice and the minimum yield re-
requirements to be fixed by INRA for cattle and agricultural products which
may require more than 30 cabs for efficient production, then an owner may
retain up to 100 -cabs, the absolute maximum. The excess over 100 -cabs,
even when the land is used for different purposes or crops, is subject to
expropriation.
The minimum yield requirements as determined by INRA regulations
could be applied to the growing year of 1959 when the law was proclaimed or
to the next season. No one knew which and, as it turned out, no one cared.
In practice, INRA representatives in the various provinces went about
seizing farmed and grazing lands without reference to their yields. There
was no indication that any landowners retained 100 cabs of land for any rea-
son. INRA officials in the six provinces I visited dipdn't direct me to any such
landowners. On the contrary, everywhere I heard the same story: INRA had
taken over and was operating as a state enterprise (called a co-operative)
whole farms, plantations and ranches. Some owners, if they were fortunate,
still had 30 cabs and some cattle (if they were ranchers), some farm machinery
(if they were sugar and rice growers), some equipment (if they were tobacco
growers). A few owners still had 50 cabs.
IPP- 5- '60
Nor did INRA in practice bother much with the order of priority for
expropriations, as set forth in the law, or for that matter, with expropriation
procedure as fixed by law. Article Five of the Agrarian Reform Law said
that in each INRA zone the delegate was first to expropriate: "public land
and private lands leased or occupied by lessees, sublessees, cane growers,
'~~bco1on'o osr sharecroppers." Then he was to expropriate "private land in
excess of the maximums L30 and 100 -cabs] permissible."
The order of priority actually followed in taking over land in the pro-
vincial zones I visited, was (a) large private ranches and farms in full pro-
duction (b) operating rice farms and their mills (c) tobacco enterprises
(d) hemp plantations (e) productive cane land (when it did not interfere with
the 1960 operations of the sugar refineries) (f) leased or unoccupied public
and private land,
Neglected, unused public land had been plowed in some places and
water pipes were being laid to make parched land usable. But these were
exceptions. The rule was that the big INRA co-operative or state-operated
farm had been created out of someone's functioning farm, ranch, rice planta-
tion, or tobacco-growing enterprise.
As I completed my swing around rural Cuba the newspapers were
carrying stories about expropriation cases just started by INRA to acquire
title to land which for months had been controlled by the agency. The greater
part of the land taken by INRA in the early stages simply was seized, the
technical term was "intervened," together with livestock, equipment and in
many instances the owner 's house and car. In some places his personal be-
longings were "intervened."
While the law makes no provision for the expropriation of personal
property, including livestock, and calls for its purchase by INRA for cash, I
heard of no one who was paid in cash for his livestock or realty. The law
v2
also provides for the issuance of government bonds bearing 4 per cent
interest with the principal payable in 20 years to be exchanged for expropri-
ated lands at values determined in the fir st instance by INRA and eventually
by courts.
In its firs t annual report published last May 17, INRA records payments
in bonds totaling $6,771,832 and in cash of $2,145,876 but these are described
as "purchases" in connection with 35,000 cabs of land "bought by INRA."
Mentioned are the Sugar Refinery Santa Martha and sisal (hemp) plantations.
2 The reference may be to the Santa Marta refinery in camaguey Province,
the property of the Central Santa Maria, S.A. INRA has purchased all Cuban
- -
hemp plantations (henequeneras) 16 in all- -and converted them into co-
operatives. Two new processing plants are said to be in operation and daily
wages were raised from $2 to $3, INRA reports. It says $250,000 was in-
vested in the industry.
Nowhere in the report is there a reference to bonds delivered for expropriated
lands. The year-end INRA report gives the total land "expropriated by courts
of justice" at 13,500 cabs and the total "being expropriated" at 146,612 cabs.
-
Of the land "being expropriated" only 26,612 cabs belong to Cuban nationals,
the balance consisting mainly of sugar cane and ranch land belonging to for-
eigners, usually Americans. (In July there was a new wave of expropriations
of American properties in "reprisal" for the United States action in reducing
the Cuban sugar quota.)
These figures must be compared to the 400,000 cabs INRA reports as
"affected by the Agrarian Reform Law" and to the 227,880 -cabs INRA says it
had intervened (seized) up to its first annual report which in general covers
only ten months of INRA operations. (For a summary of INRA figures com-
piled on the basis of the last available all-Cuban statistics approved by the
Revolutionary Government, see TABLE I on page 6.)
Particularly noteworthy in this summary are these figures: land
acquired by INRA totals 14,085,000 acres, of which only 250,649 acres had
not been tilled or otherwise utilized before. Thus, INRA holds 13,834,351
acres of farmed and pasture land. The estimated total of farmed and pasture
land in Cuba is 14,579,500 acres. 3
It is obvious that INRA in operation has far exceeded the proposed re-
forms anticipated by Cuban landowners and legalized a year ago. The land
INRA has taken--most of it by seizure and nearly all of it unpaid for--has not
been distributed to the landless peasants and small former tenants, share-
croppers, or lessees, as was carefully and fully provided for in the law.
What has actually happened is that most of what was then privately owned
productive land now belongs to the State.
INRA's fir st annual report included the following statistic:
The number of "titles" given to new landow.n .e r.s .( .o f. t.h .e . . .
"vital minimum" of two cabs or 67 acres). 576
This indicates that 1,152 c-abs o r 38,361 acres of land in the two--cab, 67-acre
plots, had been parted with by INRA to the needy Cubans of the countryside--
38,000 acres out of nearly 14,000,000 taken by INRA in the same ten months.
It is a revealing statistic in view of the repeatedly stated purpose of the
Cuban agrarian reform to redistribute the land of the big owner to the land-
less and to the smallest owner s !
INRA propagandists naturally are aware of the Cubans' reaction to
this perversion of the agrarian reform, this conversion by stealth of a
- --
3 There is a strong possibility this astounding result is misleading. Dur-
ing the period after the all-Cuban statistics were prepared and before
January 1, 1959, when Batista fled, additional unused land probably was put
into ranching, pasture, or rice cultivation.
TABLE I
[~daptedfr om National Institute of Agrarian Reform reports and official statistics
as approved by the Revolutionary Government or its officers; May-June 1960.1
March 1960 I st Annual INRA Report and.
All Cuba [estimated] INRA Report May 1960 INRA Report
Utilized Land acquired: Land acquired:
agricultural 13,500,000 acres 14,085,000 acres [no value cited]
land: 22,430,000 acres [representing an
Land acquired with bonds:
investment of
1 [by ltpurchasell]
Farms 5,607,500 acres $101,000,304.37
1,165,500 acres
Land acquired
Pasture 8,972,000 acres
with bonds : Land intervened:
Tillable 3,140,200 acres 1,155,000 acres 7,587,294 acres
Wooded & Land intervened: New land prepared for crops:
reserved 4,710,300 acres 7,517,400 acres 250,649 acres
Sugar Refineries: Sugar Refineries : Sugar Refineries:
[centrales] 161 [ ~ orte ported]
Operated by INRA 12 [seized]
Business enterprises
Industrial Operated by INRA
acquired: 109
enterprises 2,500 as subject to
[valued at $235,100,000]
recuperation*
- with more . . .
INRA also reported the total 36
than 100
construction of:
employees 140 Industries and businesses operated
10 tourist centers by INRA : umber 1 [value 1
-
with more 62 urban school centers Belonging to INRA 60 $19,200,000
than 500 107 rural schools Administer ed:r* 28 13,400,000
employees 15 12 medical centers I' BANDES*:I": 17 200,000,000
It BANFAIC*** -4 2,500,000
. . .
Totals 109 $235,100,000
Functioning
.
"Stores of the People" .1,400
Warehouses: . . .
"Stores of the Peoplet1 25
4:INRA acts as operating agency for the Treasury department which acquired for the Revolutionary
Government the 24 sugar refineries mentioned, on charges they had been acquired by their owners
during the Batista regime in some dishonest fashion.
:::::These industries are run by INRA after they were acquired by the government for various reasons
including that cited above for the 24 refineries.
:I::I::I:Prerevolutionary quasi-government institutions used to promote industry by facilitating pro-
moters, with loans, real estate, tax rebates, etc. These properties passed to INRA.
moderate reform aimed at redistributing agricultural land among Cuban in-
dividuals into an all- out transfer of individual holding s to the Government.
They evidence their concern with public opinion by the detail in which the sec-
tion of INRAts annual report showing the transfers to the landless and poor
farmers was prepared.
Much of this section deals with "the number of titles [see reproduction
of a title form, page 81 signed by INRA" (732); the "number of titles prepared
by the legal department [of INRA] and awaiting signature" by Fidel Castro
(4,800) [I was shown this bundle of certificates when I visited Castro's office
and cabinet rooms]; "the number of titles printed as of this moment" (800).
Thus INRA produces a total of 6,908 "titles." This is the figure Rev-
olutionary Government spokesmen have used and continue to use, though it
represents little more than engraved documents which might be handed 6,332
peasant families.
And what if the titles awaiting Fidel's signature, and those signed, and
those approved by the legal department and printed as of this moment are de-
-
livered? Then INRA will have parted with 12,664 cabs or 421,7 11 acres of
fertile land, not irrigated and away from urban centers, to the landless, poor
farmers of Cuba. INRA will retain possession and use of at least 13,413,640
acres of farmed and pasture land, much of it irrigated.
Assuming that INRA intends to convey all the land represented by
these unused titles, it still will remain the effective owner and operator of up
to 90 per cent of Cuba's farmed and pasture land. (See photograph of Fidel
distributing titles, page 8.)
The program for co-operatives has been used by the Fidelistas as a
device to convert the agrarian reform into a means for nationalizing the land.
The legal sanction for unlimited seizure of lands by INRA for co-operatives
was overlooked for some time by Cuban lawyers because a "sleeper" pro-
vision incorporated into the gazetted version was not in the unofficial text of
the Agrarian Reform Law as printed in the Cuban newspapers in May 1959
and circulated widely in leaflet form by the Revolutionary Government,
The "sleeper" was inserted in Article Four of the Agrarian Reform
Law, which provides for lifting of the legal limitations on the size of private
land holdings in certain cases. One of the exemptions, according to the early
version of the law, applied to land "given in usufruct to agricultural co-
. . .
"
operatives." The gazetted version said or lands expropriated for pur-
. . .
poses of this Law; I I
The step from "given in usufructtt (under which the landowner would
lose the fruits of his land but retain title) to "expropriated" was taken be-
tween the May 1959 unofficial publication and the June 3, 1959, publication of
the gazette.
DR. FIDEL CASTRO RUZ
PRESIDCNTE DEL INSTITUTO NACIONAL
DE
REFORMA AGRARIA
En uso dc 1as facultades que me confisre la Ley, declaro: PRIYIO: que el
Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria que en lo ndelnnte se denominari INRA,
es due50 en pleno dominio de una parcela de terreno quc tiene la siguiente
descripci6n:
TITULOS: El INRA adquiri6 dicha finca en la forma, modo y condiciones que
constan de la Escritura PSlblica NO. de fecha la que fui declara-
da exenta del a1 folio tomo inscripcih
CARGAS Y GRAVAMENES: el inmueble rntsriormente descripto no reconoce cargas
nl gravdmenes de clase alguna.
SEGUBDO; que a fin de dotar gratuitamente a1 agricultor, ciudadana cubano
Sr. se le cede y traspasa la finca antes descripta libre de
gravlmenes, sin mis limitaciones que las que establscc la Ley Fundamental de
la Rsforma Agraria y la proporcidn que le corrrsponda en 10s pristamos ban-
Carlos que sstuvieren afectando a la cosacha dm ssta finca y las limitacio-
nes que estableciere para servidumbres de paso, aguas, electricidad y rega-
dio, el INRA.
TZFEERO: quc en sefial de transmisidn del dominio y de real entrcga
OTORGO EL PRESENTE TITULO
A favor de
CUARTO: dice el Sr. que acepta este Titulo en la forma que
se encuentra redactado y so obliga a1 cumplimiento de las obligaciones que
la Ley impone a1 agricultor para el disfrute del "minimum vital" de ticrra
a que se refiere la citada Ley.
El Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria y el Sr.
dicen
QUINTO: que con renuncia expresa a1 fuero de sus respectivos domicilios de-
signan el lugar y jurisdiccidn que saiiale 1. Ley y su Ley Raglamentaris para
la prdctica de todas 1as notificacionas, diligencias judicialcs y extrajudi-
ciales a que diere origen el presente Titulo y la finca que es su objeto.
El Sr. Presidentel del Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria ordena a1 Sr.
Registrador de la Propiedad de proceda a inscribir en 10s Li-
ABOVE: Fidel Castro participates in
, bras Registro a su cargo la transferencia de dominio a que se refiere el pre-
ceremonial award of titulos
part of the agrarian reform
sponsored by INRA.
Dado en La Habana, a de de 19
RIGHT: Reproduction of a title form.
Arturo M. Mafias, of the Havana law firm of Gorrin, Mafias, Macia y
Alamilla, in a letter to the fir.m .' .s numerous corporate clien.t .s .o wning land in
Cuba, wrote: "In our opinion the exceptions mean that there is no
limitation as to the area of the landholdings [expropriated] and therefore the
-
30-cab and 100-& limits do not apply to thern.lt4 Events proved him right.
The "sleeper" in Article Four of the law granted INRA unlimited powers to
expropriate all the land of all the landowners in Cuba and thus negated every
other limitation in the law.
The first annual report of INRA shows that 1,269 co-operatives were
formed during its first ten months all but eight of them for agricultural pur-
- -
poses, not including INRA cattle ranching, not including INRA rice plantations,
-
and not including INRA sugar cane plantations. It is into these 1,261 INRA
state farms and into INRA's cattle, rice, and sugar cane fincas that the
13,800,000 acres of seized and expropriated land has gone (there to be worked
by hired hands under the supervision of INRA administrators), the produce to
be marked by INRA (often at prices fixed by INRA), the workers to be paid by
,
INRA (at wages fixed by INRA after deducting taxes ) and "voluntary" dona-
tions and the cost of food and necessities sold to the workers by INRA stores.
As TABLE I, page 6, shows, INRA claims it has opened 1,400 such
state retail "stores of the people" and that they are operating on a cost-plus
basis with lower prices than private retailers can offer. This is likely though
a comparison made of the prices of standard canned foods in an INRA store
on a co-operative and in a Havana chain store on the same day, showed no
marked difference. Obviously, however, the INRA stores which pay no taxes
or rent should be able to undercut stores that do, with the result that trade in
the countryside and small towns should be drawn into the state stores to the
eventual ruin of the small crossroads merchant.
INRA's people's stores thus fit into the pattern being discussed in
these reports, as another unheralded but planned effort to transform the Cuban
economy into a collectivist system. Moreover, to Cubans this recalls the
evils of the old company stores in the bateys of the sugar plantations and in
mining towns, evils outlawed years ago. They suspect that INRA's stores,
once they have removed private competitors, will be operated by,the Revolu-
tionary Government for its own purposes and as part of a state-owned econ-
omy, with the usual manipulations of prices and supply for the captive workers.
The Revolutionary Government admits none of these things. It claims
that INRA is supervising co-operatives created by groups of Cuban workers
for their own benefit; the people's stores simply are another social service
similar to hospitals, schools, and recreational centers. INRA officials offer
in proof the records of the formation of co-operatives by the workers, and,
in fact, such records do exist.
Legal study on the Agrarian Reform Law dated June 23, 1959, and made
available to the writer by a client of the firm.
IPP- 5- '60
I must have seen hundreds of these documents in the INRA provincial
and zone headquarters I visited. They record the meeting on a certain day of
the workers whose names are listed to form a certain co-operative for the
purpose of operating the agricultural property that has been intervened. One
of those present is named the chairman, a vote is taken on the formation of
the co-operative, its name, and the election of an administrator, and thus a
co-operative is born and entered upon INRA records.
INRA officials and the administrator and bookkeepers on the co-
operative assure you that the enterprise is being run for the benefit of its
.
member s
Some of the co-operative members may not yet be listed: they are the
heads of families formerly living on and working the land before it was pur-
chased by the latifundista who created the farm, ranch or plantation and put
it into operation with hired labor. The dispossessed farmers are said to be
-
awaiting the construction of homes before returning to the land from wher
ever they may be. Usually you are told that they were driven into the hills,
there to live on waste land as squatters in miserable dirt-floor thatched huts.
I have gone into the hills in various areas of the island; there are
families living in little houses and huts, working small patches of land and
raising a few pigs and chickens. Perhaps in less desirable areas there are
many more such families even poorer than those I have seen. 5
In Cuba, I am sure, there has been enough misery and squalor in the
midst of extravagant indulgence, plenty of slums and rural destitution, and,
for some Cubans, second-clas s citizenship. INRA's co-operatives as they
construct their new, fine little houses and bring back families now living in
mountain huts will remove some of these shameful conditions including racial
discrimination; a number of co-operatives are far advanced in this field.
The Revolutionary Government in INRA and through its other agencies6
is undertaking a crash program to raise the living standards of the Cubans
who were forgotten and left behind by their countrymen. The program pro-
vides such essentials as schools, health services, low-income housing, and
public recreation facilities.
The Agrarian Reform Law and INRA were presented to the Cubans
and to the world as the principal means for readjusting the imbalance in land-
ownership so as to let the landless and the poor farmers of Cuba raise their
own standards of life. This was to be accomplished by granting to each such
Conditions in the slums of provincial cities seem far worse.
These include INAV for housing and INIT for recreational facilities.
Standard o.rganizations are used for public works and sanitation.